How to contribute to Serverless open source projects

Mar 19, 2018

Interested in contributing to Serverless? Awesome.

Check this guide for everything you need to know.

Contributing to open source

While not specific to Serverless, if you’ve never contributed to open source before, you might want to check out the GitHub Open Source Guides for a general primer.

One of the most important takeaways from the guide is that you don’t have to write code to contribute:

(Quote taken from the GitHub Open Source Guide)

This is certainly true for Serverless as well, and we’ll be getting into all the ways you can help—with or without code.

Contributing to Serverless

Our Serverless Framework GitHub repo contains a contributor’s guide where we lay out the basics, and we have a similar contributor’s guide for Event Gateway.

Ways you can contribute

First of all, Serverless is more than just the Framework. We also have the Event Gateway, plus plugins and examples repositories.

We have user-contributed plugins that do everything from enabling canary deployments to mitigating cold starts. We have detailed examples for Go runtime usage and GraphQL implementations. Writing a cool new Serverless plugin or example is immensely beneficial to the community.

In terms of non-code ways you can pitch in: Review someone else’s code. Add an existing plugin or example to the list if it isn’t already there. We love all of these things.

Sometimes our docs have typos or need updates; if you see an opportunity for improvement, then click the edit button. We love that too. (Just as an FYI, you can even do that on our blog!)

Perhaps most importantly, new people try serverless all the time, and they have questions as they figure things out. Visit the forums and answer a question today. You’ll be directly giving back to the community, and perhaps even learning some new things yourself in the process.

Issues and Pull Requests

See something in the Framework or Event Gateway that you want to fix or change? Create an issue first.

That way, we can talk to you about solutions before you spend a lot of time on a PR.

Understanding labels

We use labels to categorize our issues and PRs, and you can filter by these as you search:

  • Help wanted: issues or pull requests that need special attention
  • Good first issue: special areas where first-time contributors can jump in
  • Needs feedback: if you want to contribute by providing feedback

Milestones

Want to know when the newest Framework is being released? It all depends on the milestones.

Here, for example, is our 1.27 milestone:

v1.27 gets released when all the issues are closed and pull requests are reviewed and merged.

Get started!

Other helpful resources:

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